You got that…

At 75, I’ve got a fixation for death and how many moments I’ve got left until she comes a’ knocking at my chest. I’ve got a case under my bed stored with my best suit, clean socks and a dirty movie for the man that reads me my last rights.

I’ve got cold night shivers.

Fourteen years of a government hand out and I tell you – this man ain’t leaving you anything but some kin of a lover that you never met and a collection of green bottles in the yard shed next to the radio playing Dixie tunes.

You’ve been thinking that for all these years, while I’ve been giving you hot milk bedtime stories and sending family Christmas cards to your sisters in the States, that I’ve been saving these small cheques, thinking that I’d be the first one to go. That out of these living in fibro units and in places where I move you too, that you’d get some kind of windfall – a jackpot – a shot at a better life with a better man and buy that house boat at the Marina that I promised you for all these years.

But you got it wrong, fucked up your odds, got a bastard that cashed away every god damm cheque for a home visit from Tony’s Whores every time you went away on your girl’s bus trips. And there ain’t a penny left. Just some disease ridden hands on an old man, that have held down the noise of woman half his age in our bedrooms front window for too many years.

You got that…